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Catching up on Ferrante

Yeah, no point holding out. Better get on to the bandwagon. Heard about the Daft Punk of the literary world: Elena Ferrante, through a friend who reads like I eat 🙂 This was about 2015 year-end.

Intrigued as I was I still had to trawl through my list. Which I did. And then I didn’t. For Ferrante. To figure out if the Neapolitan novels are actually that good or is it that the anonymity of the author (whom many suppose to be actually an authoress “for only a woman can understand so deeply the nuances of female friendship” or some such thing said The Guardian article on the same) that’s the best thing about these books?

Well, to me, so far, it’s the latter. However.

Here’s a passage that tells me Neapolitan novels (set in the 60s I guess) and much of Indian reality have something in common.

“Then why should your sister, who is a girl, go to school?”

The matter almost always ended with a slap in the face for Rino, who,one way or another, even if he didn’t intend to, had displayed a lack of respect toward his father. The boy, without crying, apologised in a spiteful tone of voice.

Well, I looked up Elena Ferrante and up came a message board ‘FerranteFever’, a website in ‘her’ name and a Goodreads profile. BTW, Wiki knows she was born in 1943.

It quotes Ferrante: ‘Books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.’